There have been several books written by and about John Wooden, and countless stories and documentaries.

Yet you won’t truly know the complete story about the legendary coach until you read Seth Davis’ new book, Wooden: A Coach’s Life.

Davis spent four years researching and writing this comprehensive biography. It gets to the core of a highly complex man.

Despite all of his success, Wooden also was a mass of contradictions. By and large, his players didn’t view him as a beloved coach when they actually played for him. In fact, many despised him. Outwardly, he had a cool, calm demeanor, but in private, he had a quick temper and was prone to epic eruptions.

Then the coach who was viewed as a saint in the business had an infamous UCLA booster, Sam Gilbert, who openly broke NCAA rules by giving players special favors. Wooden never stepped in to stop it. Why and should we think those 10 NCAA titles were somewhat tainted?

It all makes for fascinating reading. Davis’ book is highly recommended. One of the best sports biographies I’ve read in a long time.

Here is my Q/A.

There have been several books written about John Wooden. Why did you decide there needed to be another one?

Davis: Right, but not like this, not what I would call ‑‑ what anyone would call a traditional biography, and certainly he’s somebody who would warrant a traditional biography.

I started thinking about it ‑‑ it really goes back to a column I wrote for SI.com.  It was 2003, and Ben Howland had just gotten hired at UCLA, and I had an idea to get Howland and Wooden together.  I was living in LA at the time kind of in the process of moving back east, and my view was get them together, have breakfast at the same place, and he was a pretty accessible guy, so it was not hard to set up at all.  That breakfast ended up going back to Wooden’s apartment, which I didn’t anticipate, hadn’t even asked for, and sat there for like four hours just talking to him and being around him, and Ben left, and it was just me and him, called my father‑in‑law and surprised him and put Wooden on the phone.

So it was a very cool memory and made for a nice column.  It just would have got me thinking about it and also reading about him, and I almost would have assumed at that point that somebody had written a biography, but nobody had.

You know, it was ‑‑ every book that’s come out, and they’re all wonderful books, but they’re all by Wooden, with Wooden, or for Wooden, so this is the first one in 40 years that’s been written about Wooden.

How do you dive into a book like this?

Davis: You just dive.   It’s like I read a quote once, writing a book is like driving at night, you can only see as far as your headlights, but if you keep driving you’ll get there. You make your list, and you start talking to people.

Who were the difficult guys?  Were you able to get Kareem and Walton?  How difficult was it to get those guys?

Davis:  Kareem’s assistant told me right away, he’s not going to do it, he’s rather do his own book.

Walton was interesting.  Walton absolutely did not want to talk to me, which I knew, but also was too nice to tell me know, so he kept putting me off thinking that I would give up.  He would say, thank you for your patience, and then I thought it would be scheduled and it wasn’t.

I finally stalked him at the Final Four in New Orleans, and I basically said to him, look, if you don’t talk to me here, I’m going to move into your tepee until you do, so let’s get this over with.  We met in the courtyard of his hotel at the Final Four.  It was the Tuesday after the championship game.  It was like a good two years that I chased him, but he wouldn’t tell me no.  Even if he told me no I wouldn’t have accepted it

Did you get Walt Hazzard?

Davis:  You know what, I did.  Actually as this thing was going on I could almost make a list of people who passed away after I interviewed them.  Walt Hazzard had a very bad stroke.  It was really sad, but I did sit in his living room in Los Angeles with his wife.  He was nice as could be, but he just couldn’t talk.  And it was so sad because you ever have one of those dreams where you’re trying to talk and you know what you want to say but you can’t talk?  He knew what he wanted to say, but his brain function to be able to speak was gone, so imagine how frustrating that is.

Who were the guys that really stood out for you?

Davis: Lucius Allen was one of the first people I interviewed, and it was well before I had even gotten a contract.  I don’t know what I was doing in LA, and I don’t know why I picked him to be honest, but I reached out to him and he said, come on over, and I sat on his couch for a couple hours, and this was well before I signed a deal.

Another one of the early guys, just because he lived in Connecticut was Gail Goodrich.  We had a couple of lunches in Connecticut, and he was terrific.  I mentioned in the acknowledgments this guy Kenny Heitz.  You know this as a journalist.  You never know what the interviews are that are going to be real useful.  You just never know, is a guy going to be ‑‑ and I went to Kenny’s loft, sat there for three hours, and he’s a brilliant lawyer and just a really great story teller.  I mean, I left there with so much gold because he’s ‑‑ people really, once Wooden passed, I think people sort of felt like they could talk a little more.

One of the takeaways is that Wooden was a very complex character and he wasn’t exactly what people have their perceptions of them was. I was struck that  the players really didn’t like him that much while they were playing for him.

Davis:  Yeah, it’s interesting.

Well, that’s why I want to write the book, because I knew he was more complicated than he was being portrayed.  In reading these books, he would throw out these little hints, and all these other books would have these like when he’s talking about Bill Sweeney, he just makes an offhanded reference, and ‘then after the game I almost went after him in the shower,’ and then after we played, blah blah blah.  I’m like, wait, what do you mean you almost went after him in the shower?  What the hell does that mean?  There’s a story here.  All those hints.  And when I visited Westwood, I saw the blueprint there.  Hey, this is a competitive guy, and it makes sense.  It was like a light went off.

The guy won 10 championships.  You don’t win 10 championships by reading poetry from your easy chair on your deck.  He got after it.

And then the whole Sam Gilbert thing was just something that fascinated me.  It was just something that everybody in basketball talked about but nobody had ever really explained, and it didn’t make sense.  Well, is he 100 percent committed to these principles of integrity or not?  It’s like being kind of pregnant.

I was very conflicted about the Sam Gilbert thing. He had to have known and he didn’t appear to do anything to stop Gilbert’s activities. What was your take?

Davis: Well, so you can appreciate this.  To me Sam Gilbert was the thing that everybody knows but nobody knows. I would be at these recruiting events and talking to these basketball coaches or other writers, hey, what’s going on, how you doing.  I would say, yeah, I’m writing this book about John Wooden.  If I tell you, every single time, 99 times out of 100, the very first thing out of their mouth was, are you going to write about Sam Gilbert.  Every single time, hushed tone.

Let me ask you something.  Let me guess.  Am I going to write about Sam Gilbert.  Everybody said that.  However, if I would sit down with some friends who were big sports fans, big basketball fans or even certain people in the business who covered, I would explain the whole Sam Gilbert, he was this guy, a booster, they never heard of him.  So it was this gap between something that everybody knew and something that nobody knew.

Yeah, it’s complicated.  Guess what, life is complicated.  Guess what, John Wooden was complicated. first and foremost, I learned how insecure he was.  That to me is ‑‑ I can’t say that it surprised me, but it makes sense.  It made sense.  When I linked his experience of the great depression, losing $909, which was a lot of money in 1932, you get married, you think you’re going to start your new life, you worked all those years of working in the summers and saving away, and you get married and you start your life, and it’s gone.

So that imbued that generation of this very deep belief and understanding that no matter what you’ve accumulated, it could all be gone in an instant, and I think that really informed a lot of what he did, and he was very competitive.

So he was not secure enough to say, him or me.  He was insecure about whatever was going through his mind, he rationalized it, and then after he rationalized it, he ‑‑ I don’t like to say that he was dishonest when he would describe it because I think in his own mind it was true, but what he would say to people, the NCAA looked into it when I was coaching and they found something, just factually inaccurate. So he would explain it in a way that does not jibe with what actually happened.

So these are the layers of a very wonderful and extraordinary man who was not perfect and was presented with a very complicated situation.  The world was bearing down on him from every direction.

If you think about it, if you think about it, and that universe and at that time, Sam Gilbert was a pretty minor ‑‑ I would say secondary pressure point for him.  He had other problems.  He had other problems than Sam Gilbert.  It’s only in retrospect, and where I think Wooden is most vulnerable to criticism on this front is what he did after he was coaching, which is to spend 35 years writing and speaking and lecturing and talking to interviewers like myself about integrity and principles, and here’s how you should live your life and how’s how I lived my life.

So then you have the Bob Knights of the world who have taken a lot of flak for not being as morally upright as John Wooden, and whatever you want to say about Bob Knight, and I’m not a big fan of Bob Knight, but there’s never been a whiff of impropriety with the NCAA with Bob Knight.

As a biographer, you’re less judgmental, you know the mission is to explain what happened. I knew from being on the beat that the Sam Gilbert thing was going to be really interesting to report and to write, to explain and then to watch the reaction of people like yourself.

What kind of reaction have you gotten to the Gilbert part?

Davis:  I think people just really find it interesting.  I don’t think he’s really being castigated.  It’s not like there’s headlines about it.  A lot of people knew about it.  I think a lot of people frankly, when they heard that I would be writing a Wooden book, kind of assumed that I would not address it, that I would skip over this.  I think more than anything people are impressed that I took it on.

I think people are maybe disappointed on a certain level, but if they read the whole book, then I think they know that this book is not a big takedown of John Wooden.  That’s not what I set out to do.  It’s certainly ‑‑ I just think the whole portrait of Wooden in the book I think people see him as real.  Like I think people appreciate the chance to learn more about how he ‑‑ what he was really like and what his life was really like as opposed to the sort of two‑dimensional picture that’s been presented.

We talk about his flaws, but what traits allowed him to succeed, other than having the great fortune of having two of the top three college basketball players of all time almost back to back?

Davis:  No question, although as I say to people when people sort of denigrate, well of course he had ‑‑ Mel Sanders said, yeah, well, that’s five.  Five to go.  You also have one with Dave Meyers and Marcus Johnson.

I think what comes across to me, and I hope to the reader, both how he coached and how he lived, is just his consistency, that he really just kind his hand to the till all those years, and whether he succeeded or failed or lived up to ‑‑ he pretty much stayed the same guy with the same belief system and really kind of stuck to it as best as he could.

And I think that really served him well as those chips were rolling in.  That whole thing about balance, about avoiding peaks and valleys, about controlling the controllables.  I think he pretty much stuck to that.  And if he hadn’t, he would not have been able to manage the ’60s and early ’70s and the tumult and social upheaval and all of that, and I also think even though his players didn’t always understand him and in many ways didn’t particularly like him, I think he genuinely loved them.

I think he had trouble expressing that and showing that to them, but I think in his heart, he really loved them, and I don’t think they would have played hard for him if they didn’t sense that on some level.

They wouldn’t have played for him if they didn’t sense that he really cared for them, and of course that came out over time after he was through playing, when he learned how to express it to them. That’s the other thing that I think you have to give Wooden credit for, that sign on his office wall that said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts,” I think he really lived that.  I think that he really every day tried to keep an open mind because he never believed that he knew it all.

You finished the book writing about your three visits with him. How did those visits shape your image of him?

Davis:  Yes, that’s a great point.  That’s a great point.  I’ve always believed, and I’m sure you’ve had this same experience, that you can only judge people based on your personal interactions.  We’ve all had colleagues where people say this guy is a bad guy, but he’s nice to me.  For me to have those experiences with him and get a sense of what he was like personally, definitely, and they were very positive experiences.  I mean, I really treasured those memories.  Whatever journey I was taking with him, I was going to always end up back in that den with him, and I think that definitely informed the arc of the book.